Sunday, February 23, 2014

So you've followed our SSH tutorial and now you're ready to hand out accounts to your friends, right? Well, there are times when you want to securely share files with them, but don't want them having shell access to your server. OpenSSH includes SFTP, the secure file transfer protocol, which provides both authentication and encryption. Normally, you need to give a user an SSH login for them to be able to transfer files via SFTP, but there’s also a useful option to disallow shell access and only let them transfer files. What's more, you can lock them to a certain directory so they can't browse your filesystem. This tutorial will show you how to do just that. I’m assuming you already have sshd configured and running.

Let's create a new user for them to use and edit the sshd_config file to chroot them.

Now you can give your friend the SFTP login and they will be locked in the home directory, but able to upload and download things to and from the "files" directory. If they try to login via SSH to get a shell, they should get the error: